Abstract

Background

Illegal adoption, which mainly includes child trafficking and informal adoption, has long been a prevalent social issue in China. However, the processes and patterns of illegal adoption are not well understood due to the scarcity of data.

Objective

The findings are expected to provide insightful clues for the government and the public to better understand the two categories of illegal adoption.

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When Nicole Koman is a few months old, she is adopted from a home. Although she ends up with loving foster parents, her adoption always plays a role. Sometimes in the foreground, then again in the background.

Nicole wrote a book about her adoption. The discovery of my other history has been in stores since this spring.

Nicole: 'Loving youth'

“There was never any secrecy about my adoption. My parents, as I prefer to call my adoptive parents, always talked about it openly.” But Nicole didn’t really know much about her biological father and mother. “Not much was known about it and I never really felt the need to know. I had my parents, family and friends. My childhood was very loving.” Nicole was therefore never ‘bothered’ by the fact that she was adopted. “People were sometimes surprised about my adoption. Many people think that it always concerns children from abroad. But Dutch children are also adopted.”

Lost between two continents, Priyangika starts a quest to uncover the truth about her adoption.

Adopted from Sri Lanka to Norway at only seven weeks old, Priyangika has always longed for her biological family.

She travels to Sri Lanka to fill in the missing pieces of her identification papers, her family history and her broken heart. But finding her birth mother does not bring her the peace of mind she is searching for. Instead, a need to uncover the secrets of her past leads her to an investigation of the complexity of the international adoption process.

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Revealed: Members of alleged illegal adoption gang that sold babies to Italy keep high-profile jobs despite charges

The alleged ringleader of an illegal network that is accused of selling Armenian children to Italian couples is still working in adoption while on trial, a year-long investigation has discovered.

A joint probe by openDemocracy and Italian investigative website IrpiMedia has found that Anush Garsantsyan is seemingly still involved in arranging adoptions.

And many of her 10 co-defendants – including Armenia’s top obstetrician, a key government official responsible for international adoptions and child welfare workers – also continue to hold senior positions in maternal healthcare and the government.

The news comes four years after a criminal investigation opened into the adoptions of 20 Armenian children between 2015 and 2018, all of whom are said to be alive and living in Italy.

Holt Children’s Services will explain its decision to appeal a recent court ruling ordering the agency to compensate an adoptee for his botched adoption in a press conference on Thursday.

In a press release on Tuesday, the adoption agency said some media companies have been reporting malicious and one-sided assertions and that it would like to express its position based on objective facts. 

The Seoul Central District Court earlier this month ordered the Seoul-based agency to pay Adam Crapser, also known by his Korean name Shin Song-hyuk, 100 million won, or around 75-thousand U.S. dollars, in damages for a suit he had filed against Holt and the South Korean government in 2019.

The court said the agency had failed in its duty as the adoptee's guardian to confirm the acquisition of U.S. citizenship following his 1979 adoption, which eventually led to his deportation. It, however, did not recognize state responsibility.

While Crapser’s biological parents were alive prior to his adoption, his birth had not been registered, making it possible at the time for the agency to register him as an orphan and therefore eligible for international adoption.

Crapser was subsequently abandoned by two sets of adoptive parents following abuse and was unable to properly apply for citizenship, leading to his deportation back to South Korea in 2016.

Oxford University research reveals 17,000 out-of-area placements in England can be attributed to the corporate takeover of care

The corporate takeover of children’s care has led to more children moving between short-term, unstable placements far away from their families, according to research.

The Oxford University study – which drew on more than 600,000 care records – revealed 17,000 out-of-area placements in England can be attributed to the outsourcing of care to for-profit providers between 2011 and 2022.

The research, to be published on Monday, also shows growing private involvement in care provision has disrupted the lives of vulnerable children, with higher rates of outsourcing linked to higher rates of placements breaking down within two years, which is regarded as a benchmark of stability by the government.

“Our analysis shows that for-profit outsourcing is consistently associated with more children being placed out of area and placement instability,” said the study’s co-author Dr Anders Bach-Mortensen from Oxford’s Department for Social Policy and Intervention and Roskilde University. “Over the last decade, we see that these outcomes have deteriorated or stagnated while for-profit outsourcing have increased.”

Andrea Eaton officially adopted Maya from orphanage in August 2022; now living in Ghana awaiting citizenship

Nine months after receiving her daughter's official adoption papers from Lagos State in Nigeria, Andrea Eaton of Tillsonburg, Ont., is still waiting to bring her daughter, Maya, home.

It's not an unfamiliar story — Canada has a track record of delaying entry to adopted Nigerian children. It's a problem advocates say is inexcusable and contravenes Canada's international and domestic commitments to children.

"I've missed — we both have — family events, Christmas, my parents have my dogs, my house is vacant," said Eaton who now lives in Accra, Ghana with Maya.

AHMEDABAD: Prachi, 12, was surrendered to the court as a five-year-old by her parents following a family feud. Suffering from TB and a rare skin condition - erythroderma or exfoliative dermatitis - she initially lived in a juvenile foster home for three years and then at Missionaries of Charity facility for five years. As her condition leaves her with blackened skin which is hard like 'scales', she was rejected twice as a child for adoption, said foster home officials.
Prachi, however, got third time lucky when she found her family in Manju Goel, a MD (medicine) from Madison, Wisconsin in the US. Manju is already a single mother to two daughters, both adopted. She will welcome Prachi to her family and is likely to fly back to US this week following completion of formalities. The Ahmedabad regional passport office processed Prachi's passport in a day as a special case, said adoption agency officials.
 

The state child protection officers said that family conditions forced the parents of Prachi to surrender her to the court in 2015 when she was four years old. She was first kept in Shishu Gruh at Paldi and later the NGO's facility for children and adolescents. Officials said that as a child Prachi was diagnosed with a lesion of TB for which she has undergone surgeries twice - once in Civil Hospital and another at a private hospital.

Dimple M, a coordinator at Missionaries of Charity, said that while Prachi's TB is under control, her skin condition, attributed to genetic factors, persists.
Prachi was happy to meet her sister, mother
Dimple M, a coordinator at Missionaries of Charity, said, “The condition requires regular moisturizing to avoid the skin from getting too dry and peel off. As the condition affects the upper layer of skin, it also hampers perspiration. Due to her looks, she could not make many friends. The rejection by prospective parents also hurt her somewhere. But her pain vanished when she got to know about her new family – in the US”. Goel also has an interesting story of her own, said NGO officials. She emigrated to the US as a child and lives across the home of her parents. She never got married, but to fulfill her wish to be a mother, she adopted two girls – one from Mumbai and another from Pune over the past 16 years.
The girls are now 20 and 15 years of age. One of the girls accompanied her to India to complete the formalities of adoption at the NGO. “A medical practitioner, she feels closer to orphan children as her father was a probation officer in one such facility in Delhi. It was a wholesome moment as both Manju and Prachi got a member to complete the family. The family has made special arrangements at the Madison residence to welcome her,” said a social worker at the NGO. “Prachi was so happy to meet her sister and mother. A reserved girl, she enjoys the company of close friends. We’re sure that she’ll grow to her full potential with her family.”

A senior official at Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) official in Gujarat said that children with any health conditions or disability find it difficult to get adopted. “The trend indicates that Indian parents often go for the healthier children. Girls are often the first choice. It is mainly adoptive parents from abroad who choose children that need special care,” said the official.

With her second book 'Love from China', former Balk star Tirza Kingma has written a disarming and honest story about the adoption of her son Wen, his growing up with cleft palate and the trips the family made to China.

In 2010, Kingma traveled to southern China with her husband, their two biological daughters and Kingma's mother to adopt Wen. A year earlier he was born in the vicinity of Kunming, the city of eternal spring. He grew up in Friesland, underwent several operations on his cleft palate and followed an intensive speech therapy program. Wen developed into a cheerful and active boy. In the meantime, the family traveled to China twice more, including for a 'roots trip'.

Cleft palate

In 2014, the family traveled around the world to Thailand, Australia and Hong Kong. Kingma: “Wen was five years old and we wanted to introduce him to his native country in a casual way that was not adoption-related. At home, after a wonderful trip, he said: 'I didn't see anyone with a cleft lip in China.' We had seen that he felt at home in Hong Kong, but we had not realized that he had looked at all the faces so intently.”

Personal book